Cumbria Wildlife Trust and Hadrian’s Wall Heritage Ltd have celebrated Make a Difference day on the 31 October 2009 in advance. They held a joint conservation work party at Cumbria Wildlife Trust’s Drumburgh Moss National Nature Reserve, in the north of the county, making a positive difference to the peat bog habitat here.

A small band of volunteers and staff (and not forgetting Lucy the dog) set out on a beautiful sunny day armed with bowsaws, loppers, good spirits and biscuits! The tasks for the day were to cut back gorse and scrub and burn it on a fire. This ensures that the gorse and scrub don’t become the dominant plant species on this wet heathland area, allowing other plant species, like heather, to flourish.

It also opens up the area to allow the Exmoor ponies that graze here (to help control the scrub) to get into this part of the nature reserve. When the spring comes next year, they will graze any young gorse and silver birch saplings, preventing them from getting mature again. The ponies were most grateful to the hard-working volunteers and came to see what was going on and graze on the fresh grass that was now easily accessible.

The reserve officer, Morag, also gave a short talk about the nature reserve and why the task was being done. By lunch time, a lovely fire was burning the scrub (it is not easy to remove this scrub from the nature reserve in any other way) was a blaze and this provided a great source of heat to sit around and have a chat over sandwiches. At the end of the day, the volunteers had achieved a huge amount of work and all had a great day.

Cumbria Wildlife Trust is holding further conservation work parties on its nature reserves in the week around Make a Difference Day. So come along, get involved and ‘Make a Difference’ in helping to conserve Cumbria’s wildlife!